Talk:Potted Meat
If there's no meat in Rapture, then... Is anybody else wondering what the hell is used in the Potted Meat? I mean, we know for a fact that stuff like beef had to be smuggled into Rapture, so... Either Ryan has a sort of combined farm and slaughterhouse somewhere in Rapture, the "meat" is really either fish or some kind of ADAM creation, or- ...Shit. What if it's like a Sweeny Todd/Soylent Green thing? ... Or was it actually explained somewhere, and I'm just an idiot? (Jane St. Valentine (talk) 07:32, June 14, 2016 (UTC)) : Where is it said that beef had to be smuggled into Rapture? I mean if they had a race track for horses I doubt they didn't have room for a place to hold cattle. Night at the Kashmir (talk) 23:24, June 14, 2016 (UTC) : - : You might smuggle in better cuts of meat and luxury type stuff (otherwise that method is a bit too expensive to feed very many people). If they had farms (plants for grain/silage) then you can have farm animals large and small. : Potted meat is just canned meat, which can be 'lesser cuts' and often stuff a little better than what you grind up to turn into hotdogs/sausage. It can also be minced/puree'd too. : 13:12, June 15, 2016 (UTC) ::Potted Meat only shows up in BS2 and I suspect that it's something they really didn't consider to deeply for the first game. While they do have horses (as proven in Burial at Sea Pt 1), keeping a large number of cattle would seem to be rather difficult. Chicken on the other hand would be a lot easier. :) The advertisement for Beef.e seem to indicate that it's not real beef, though your opinion might differ from mine. "Specifically it says "The taste you remember." sm --Solarmech (talk) 12:10, June 16, 2016 (UTC) ::- ::Beef-E ::With all the vagaries of the game, the product may have originated years after Rapture's founding and possibly was offered after someone started (whenever) to bring beef animals into Rapture for local raising (or made them cheaper - enough to sell to more people). So it is possibly it WAS Rapture produced beef ( using the lesser grades of it). (We saw TV dinners also impying some kind of meat). ::Chickens rabbits goats pigs generally have a higher meat to feed ratio than beef, making them cheaper to produce, smaller animals being more managable. For people sick of seafood they all would be accepted. Potted Meat is often spiced and ground up thoroughly to make less obvious the grade of meat (and byproducts) used and can be from any animal (and maybe fillers like soybean added). ::The oxygen used coming from plants would allow for plenty of vegetation to be animal food (grains grown for humans leaves the rest of the plant -silage). Artificial light for growing wouldn't be terribly hard (with cheap/abundant geothermal power and heat). Machines and hydroponic methods could be used to reduce labor to Surface levels. Fishing has its own difficulties/costs, and fish farms might be more optimal for much of that production (again using Rapture produced grain to feed). Grain for carbohydrates would be the staple if less meat protein was available than typical surface urban places (beans,vegetables,fruits to be grown etc... milk products...) :: 15:49, June 16, 2016 (UTC) ::In answer to the question posed earlier, it was Peach Wilkins' removed Audio Diary Smuggling is a Crime: "pick up some choice goods not available in a remote place like Rapture, you know: beef, real tobacco, just a little extras." ::I'm inclined to agree that it was high-quality beef and other luxury, niche, or rare goods that were being smuggled in. Here's another thing that I thought of, surely we've all seen this sign to the right from the cafe in the Farmer's Market. How is it possible that almost everything is in quotation marks? Is it saying that as the Rapture Civil War grew more intense, it became harder to get basic supplies for businesses? Perhaps, but what if some of these items were unavailable because of blight? In a confined place like Rapture, disease could spread more easily and the effects of a poor harvest would be far more severe than on the surface. If a strain of Mad Cow Disease or Swine Flu or some other illness decimated the livestock of Rapture during a particular year, the smugglers could make bank off of the demand. ::Unownshipper (talk) 08:54, June 18, 2016 (UTC) ::Its hard to think what they might have substituted for the 'apple' in Caramel Apple (simulated apple made from squash is rather unthinkable). Perhaps the emphasis there is to highlight the specialness of the item being listed (remembered from the Surface world... of limited availability ... no price because "if you have to ask..."). Pecan might be a bit specialized to be other than an imported item (or out of a limited stockpile). ::Possible evidence of how blatant the smuggling had grown... ::Lazarus Vector applied 'for your crop' - at the Right price .... :: 11:18, June 18, 2016 (UTC) :::From Burial at Sea we get this: ""Don't settle for tiny little fruits and vegetables. We scientifically boosted our harvests, so a single banana can feed a family of four! Come see what we mean, at the farmer's market in Dionysus Park: because bigger is better." So it seems fruit and vegetable production was "big" before the Wars started. ;) We see some oversized squash in the Tree Farm in Arcadia in BS1 as well. Given the games you can play with ADAM I wonder if you could gets plants to grow something that resembles/tasted like meat. Of course lot of people would want the real thing and would pay top dollar for what would be considered low grade meat on the surface. Rapture does seem to produce enough food to feed itself as we don't see any signs of famine or mass starvation in the games. sm --Solarmech (talk) 11:54, June 18, 2016 (UTC) :::Chalkboard writings are ephemeral, so whatever the last thing written can have little to do with what was written in Raptures 'golden age'. This chalkboad is from after the 'civil war' disruptions started, which would make even normal food harder to obtain (even in the areas largely secured by Ryan's security measures the whole economy would be impaired by the terrorist activities of Atlas and his crew). Shops and such would try to sell out whatever luxuries they had left to obtain as much money (or whatever) to assure their own survival basics for the future. Ryan might encourage an appearance of 'normalcy', but if you can't get the materials anymore and run out, then you simply can't sell them. :::Of course this is a generic sign (reused game asset) seen in a number of different places, so we can only speculate so far about any specific significance. ::: 13:06, July 14, 2016 (UTC) ::::If this were an archaeology class, I'd agree with you that a chalkboard isn't an indication of "set in stone" history. However, this is BioShock where time and energy was put into every little detail. Here, if something is present, it's meaningful, especially if it's indicative of Rapture's history. The city is a (decaying) time capsule where even the New Year's Eve balloons still hang in place in the Kashmir Restaurant long after the party ended. In the real world, we'd get multiple points of view, but here a single Audio Diary is the first and last word on an event, b/c that's how game narratives function. This is a long way of saying that "Chalkboard writings are ephemeral" is not a valid argument here. ::::Furthermore, it's impossible to say that the board is from after the 'civil war' disruptions (AKA midway through the Rapture Civil War). It very well may be from a period after the civil war had disrupted access to normal food stuffs and ingredients, but it's just as possible that it was from before. Lastly, I don't recall seeing this particular sign in any other location than the shop in the lower level of the Farmer's Market. ::::Regardless, this topic is pretty much closed: While certain types of meat may have been smuggled into the city, there certainly was meat produced in Rapture. ::::Unownshipper (talk) 16:40, July 14, 2016 (UTC) ::::The same "Menu" chalkboard can be found in The Mermaid lounge in Siren Alley in BS2 (I thought the one in Point Prometheus MP level was also, but that turned out to be a winelist sign -- also seen in several other MP levels). :::: 09:27, July 15, 2016 (UTC)